MA Race, Media & Social Justice

Course information

Department

Length

1 year full-time or 2 years part-time

Course overview

How we live with difference is the key issue of our time. Issues relating to race and ethnicity, whether immigration, Islamophobia, #blacklivesmatter, or media diversity, are at the forefront of public debate. The MA Race, Media and Social Justice will equip you with critical and theoretical tools to unpack and deepen your understanding of contemporary debates on race, ethnicity and racism.

Why study MA Race, Media and Social Justice at Goldsmiths?

Goldsmiths is a centre of pioneering critical race scholarship and you will be taught by leading figures in the field.

You’ll examine a range of different theoretical and philosophical approaches to race and ethnicity, including postcolonial and critical race theories, poststructuralist approaches, and theories of intersectionality.

The degree is underpinned by a focus on the cultural industries and you’ll learn to apply these theories to understand why representations of race and ethnicity take the shape that they do in news, film and social media.

You’ll expand your practical and academic knowledge of diversity in the media and other sectors through a series of industry talks from Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) practitioners working in the industry.

As a postgraduate student you will join a thriving intellectual community at Goldsmiths, while learning the skills that you will be able to apply to a range of careers, from media, to policy, to charity/NGOs and other forms of social enterprise.

Contact the department

What you'll study

Core modules

Race Critical Theory and Cultural Politics

30 credits

The module offers a strong conceptual basis for understanding theories of race and racialisation historically and with regard to contemporary cultural contexts and political debates. Critical attention is focused on an examination of the theories and concepts that sociologists and cultural studies theorists have used to think about the formation of ethnic and racial identities in relation to social justice, specifically the social ideals of equality, valuing diversity, and the right to live in dignity. The module explores the challenges of reconciling the analytical rigour of race critical theories and practical aims of oppositional political agendas within the contemporary conjuncture of racism and multiculturalism.

Race and the Cultural Industries

30 credits

While both academic and industry research has long established how racial and ethnic minorities are portrayed negatively in the media, in recent times there has been an increase in the level of campaigning around issues of representation – from the trending of #oscarssowhite, to the activism of the website Media Diversified, and recent parliamentary interventions made by actors Lenny Henry and Idris Elba demanding more diversity on and off screen. The aim of this module is to develop a rigorous, theoretically and empirically grounded approach to the topic of diversity in the media in order to help students develop an in-depth and nuanced understanding of how cultural industries work to produce discourses around race.

The unique intervention of the Race and the Cultural Industries module is in drawing attention to the context of production. It explores the experience of people of colour working in the cultural industries to help explain why representations of race take the form that they do. In order to address the varied contextual factors that shape representations of race, there is a strong stress on interdisciplinarity, combining critical media studies (including political economy and cultural studies perspectives) with race critical scholarship (postcolonial theory, poststructuralist and post-Marxist approaches). By focusing on cultural production the overall aim of the module is to demonstrate how racialized minorities who work in the media are constrained (or enabled) by the conditions of the cultural industries. Moreover, the module is designed to help future practitioners conceptualise their own forms of antiracist media practice.

Dissertation for MA Race, Media and Social Justice

60 credits

The dissertation requires you to demonstrate knowledge, understanding and critical reasoning but also to initiate a new project, to work independently and conduct new research, to apply knowledge acquired across the programme and to contribute to ongoing research in one of the main areas of the programme.

Race, Empire and Nation

30 credits or 15 credits

This module will examine how histories of Western imperialism have shaped the landscapes of the present. Our task is to explore how contemporary racial and national formations (ideas about ‘Britishness’, ‘whiteness’, and so on) exist in a complex and intimate relationship to longer histories of empire.

In addition to introducing key concepts from critical race and postcolonial studies, lectures will also draw on phenomenology to explore how race structures the present, often by receding into the background, as well as theories of affect and emotion to explore how security regimes become racial regimes.

Our concern is with how histories of empire ‘get under the skin’, and set readings include works that reflect on the experience of being or becoming strangers, or ‘bodies out of place’. We also attend to the intersection between race, gender and sexuality throughout.

Postcolonial Theory

30 credits

From Ferguson to Gaza, from the local to the global, this module proposes that we are faced with the necessity to revisit the canonical texts of postcolonial theory in order to make sense of our contemporary world. The aim of the module is to introduce you to a selection of these founding texts, and to consider the manner in which the spectre of colonialism persists in our present, both in our material reality and as a ‘spectropoetics’ that haunts the unconscious.

In this sense, you will read classic postcolonial texts of the twentieth century together with contemporary academic, activist and artistic interventions and countersignatures. Close, first-hand reading of texts is emphasised and you are required to probe the whole spectrum of postcolonial thinking—from literary theory, politics, psychoanalysis, diaspora studies, race and gender studies to philosophy, art, anthropology and history—and as such interrogate the production and circulation of knowledge from diverse positionalities. We seek to problematize the very notion of post-coloniality, understood not as a temporal marker but more as a style of thought—as a problem, a question and an option, an ‘epistemic and political project’.

We begin the module from the present, with a questioning of the links and divergences between postcolonial theory and current decolonial thinking (in particular where this concerns struggles across today’s global south), in order to invest our readings of canonical postcolonial texts with a sense of urgency and to set out a disciplinary framework.

Weekly topics are organised conceptually and across geographical and temporal boundaries through the themes such as the following, each of which re-inflects the next: objectivity; recognition; representation; ecology; relation; translation; ambivalence, appropriation; repair and reconciliation.

Race, Gender And Social Justice

30 credits

This course aims to investigate discourses of equality and social justice in the context of the changing manifestations of race, religion, class, gender and sexuality in advanced capitalist and neoliberal times. Taking an interdisciplinary case study approach the course examines international research on pertinent issues such as educational inequalities, migration, religious difference and gendered violence.

The course takes an intersectional approach drawing on feminist perspectives and critical race theory to understand the ‘border crossings’ of transnational peoples as they ‘live out’ new and affective religious, ethnic, class, sexual and gendered identities in rapidly changing global contexts.

The course will focus on three broad areas of inquiry: First, discourses on multiculturalism and concern about ‘the migrant’ frames our focus on social justice. Here we look at race, gender, citizenship and belonging in the context of Islamophobia, securitization and the nation state. Second, mapping differences among raced, gendered, classed and faith based groups in education, health and employment enables a critical analysis of social justice discourses such as ‘diversity‘ in the context of the ubiquitous nature of whiteness, patriarchy and elitism in our institutions. Third, we contextualise the courses’ concern with social justice and inequality by looking at agency and ‘voice’ and the struggle for civil, political and social rights. In particular we examine transnational feminist, ethnic and indigenous social movements and the emergence of postcolonial pedagogies of difference and dissent.

Music as Communication and Creative Practice

30 credits

Why does music matter? What is its value? What makes music a distinctive form of communication? In what ways does music enhance people’s lives, and produce forms of individual and collective flourishing? Conversely, how can music reinforce social hierarchies? How does music link to questions of social power, notably in terms of class, race and gender, in relation to its production and consumption?

This module explores how musical meanings are conveyed and understood and how this is mediated through the cultures and technologies of production and consumption. We will consider how music communicates mood and meaning, not only through associated imagery and the lyrical content of songs, but as sound itself. We will also think about the processes that link production, circulation and consumption, as well as explore the ways that music connects with individual and collective identities, across space and time.

No technical knowledge about music is required for this module. Rather, we are interested in the social, cultural and psychological experience of music, as well as the political-economic context of music production and consumption. You are encouraged to draw on your own personal experience of music in everyday life and to make use of this material in connection with some of the theoretical approaches under discussion during seminars (as well as others you will have come across in your reading and on other modules).

Gender, Sexuality and Media

30 credits

This option module examines the relations between gender, sexuality and media. It aims to explore the ways in which gender and sexuality are constituted through a broad range of media, and how they may be resisted, intervened in and created differently. The module considers media in an open sense, understanding it to include practices of mediation, technological processes and modes of production and consumption, as well as particular cultural forms including television, film, music, digital and social media, art and design. It attends to how gender and sexuality are not stable identities or classifications but are instead processes involving relations with media and technologies, and with ‘race’, ethnicity, class and dis/ability.

The module is taught in a combination of lectures, seminars, screenings and workshops. As well as exploring media through different theoretical, conceptual and methodological approaches, practice-research is embedded in the module, meaning that you will try out different practices of making and analysing media. As examples, these practices might include experimenting with creative writing, blogging, collaging, photography, video, drawing. This work will go towards a portfolio that you will build up over the term.

Visualising Asia: Body, Gender, Politics

30 credits

From western antiquity until modern times, the body in the west has been aestheticised, vilified, eroticised and pathologised. It is in and through the body that both self and society have been fashioned and disciplined.

It is at the heart of the emergence of sexuality as a modern discourse, and a constituent feature of the politics of identity, formed around race, gender and sex. For all the different debates the body has generated, they have always been framed within the mind/body, and nature/culture distinctions, which have been at the core of western thinking since the eighteenth century.

Navigating Urban Life

30 credits

This module addresses significant issues in the contemporary organisation of urban landscapes, urban life and connections between cities as well as the interface between human and architectural fabric. Drawing on specific empirical examples in based in China, Hong Kong, the US, London and parts of mainland Europe this module examines key debates in urban sociology and research. There is a strong focus on visual apprehension of cities and ways of accessing and researching cities through photography. The following sessions have been offered in previous years:

A tour of 'urban theory' from the Chicago School to the present day. This sets up the conceptual basis for the session following which, although empirically focused on specific cities, illuminate different conceptual frameworks for understanding urbanism.

Whose City? This examines debates concerned with the social production of space and rights to the city. An examination of ghetto urbanism in the US through Wacquant, Bourdieu, Bourgeois and the research through which this kind of urban knowledge is generated.

Pastness and Urban Landscape. This examines discrepant and linear notions of time/interpretations of pastness, collective memory, and how pasts are inscribed within urban landscapes. We will draw mainly on visually-led investigation of Hong Kong and London to explore these themes.

Post-Colonial Cities. This session examines the intersections between globalisation and colonialism in Hong Kong and in the lives of ‘skilled’ migrants from the global North. It makes extensive use of photographic narratives of Hong Kong as an iconic city landscape and the use of environmental portraiture to capture migrants’ relationships to the city.

Globalisation, Migration and Urban Life. Drawing on visual empirical research on mosques and African churches in London this session examines the impact of recent and current migration on commerce, religion and city landscape. It sets this in broader debates about globalisation and cities developed from the previous session.

Material Cultures and Multiple Globalisations. This session draws on some of the more ordinary trajectories of commodities and collaborations composing the global world through small trade between China/Hong Kong and Africa, and Europe and Africa.

Mega-Cities and Non-City Zones. This session is set in China. It examines architecture, the generic city, land speculation and the dynamics between mega-cities and economic and technical development zones through some of the lives that are lived in them.

Urban Regeneration. This session examines the politics, debates, conceptualisation and social divisions generated and sustained in urban renewal projects. Who benefits from these projects? How do they reconstruct cities? We will draw specifically on Olympic-related redevelopments in Athens, London, and Beijing.

Architectural and Planning Politics. This session examines ways in which political and military decisions are embedded in architecture and planning. It draws on Weizman’s Hollow Land and asks questions about whether this involves a radical re-conceptualisation of space.

Mobilities. This session is concerned with movement and routes as well as the infrastructure and technologies of mobility such as bridges, roads, airports, stations, tunnels, trains, motor transport, and shipping. It asks critical questions about whether these approaches to space generate information about social morphology or social life more generally.

Cultural Studies and Geography: Speed, Mobility and Territory

15 credits

This module addresses the emergent relations of virtual and material geographies and focuses on questions of territory, communication and speed. It is concerned with the mobilities of information, people and objects and will address topics such as the dynamics of migrancy/nomadology and sedentarism; questions of globalisation, regionalisation and the reassertion of border controls; the role of tele-technologies in the transformation of temporal and spatial relations; processes of de/re-territorialisation and ‘new mobilities’; and differential demographies of technology use.

These issues will be considered from an interdisciplinary perspective, and will draw on cultural studies, cultural geography, communication studies, anthropology and logistics. The module’s concerns will be exemplified through focussing on three of the iconic figures of the contemporary era of modernity - the migrant, the mobile phone and the container box.

An(Other) China: Postcolonial Theory, Postmodern Concerns

30 credits

This subject is built around glimpses of, and insights into, the lives of ordinary Chinese people and the rules and rituals that govern their existence. You will discuss the ways everyday life was governed under socialism and the ways that control is now breaking down with the emergence of a consumer culture, enabling a close scrutiny of the politics of everyday life. Picking up on themes as diverse and quirky as Mao badge fetishists, hoodlum slang, and the role of the tattoo, the subject examines the way a range of people not only live but resist dominant social discourse.

We will employ an array of critical thinking from Western social theorists and it is this that is highlighted through themes such as ‘commodities and collection’, ‘authorship and biography’, questions of power, violence and excess as well as themes of fore-thrownment, sacrifice and desire. You will gain a grounding not only in the politics of everyday life in China but also in Western theoretical engagements with the everyday.

This module will give you an insight into different values systems and political forms and in taking up the issue of politics in a culturally different way gaining an understanding of the heuristic value of certain schools of social, cultural and political theory

Palestine and Postcolonialism

30 credits

‘Palestine’ has become one of the most potent cultural/political signifiers of our time. This module aims to unpack some of its complex histories and meanings, with a view to understanding why it plays such a central role in contemporary debates about ‘Islamic radicalism’, neo-colonialism/globalisation, the decline of the West, human rights and ‘terrorism’. In doing so, it seeks to remedy a signal oversight in mainstream postcolonial studies, which has historically evaded any serious engagement with ‘Palestine’. These issues will be approached in a multi-disciplinary fashion, drawing on literary and cultural studies, politics, religious studies, trauma studies, film studies, history and ethnography. Particular attention will be paid to how cultural representation mediates relationships of power and ideology; and the role and effects of different styles, genres and modes of representation (fiction, memoir, graphic novel, film, poetry etc) in such mediations.

Please note: this is an experimental module and some of the texts will be less readily available than on comparable options. Students must be prepared to use internet sites like Amazon and AbeBooks to source out-of-print material, although every effort will be made to provide some stocks of each text in the library.

30 credits

Assessment

Assessment consists of coursework, extended essays, reports, presentations, practice-based projects or essays/logs, group projects, reflective essays, and seen and unseen written examinations.

Additional costs

In addition to your tuition fees, you'll be responsible for any additional costs associated with your course, such buying stationery and paying for photocopying. You can find out more about what you need to budget for on our study costs page.

There may also be specific additional costs associated with your programme. This can include things like paying for field trips or specialist materials for your assignments. Please check the programme specification for more information.

If available, an electronic copy of your educational transcript (this is particularly important if you have studied outside of the UK, but isn’t mandatory)

You'll be able to save your progress at any point and return to your application by logging in using your username/email and password.

When to apply

We accept applications from October for students wanting to start the following September.

We encourage you to complete your application as early as possible, even if you haven't finished your current programme of study. It's very common to be offered a place that is conditional on you achieving a particular qualification.

Late applications will only be considered if there are spaces available.

If you're applying for funding, you may be subject to an earlier application deadline.

Selection process

Admission to many programmes is by interview, unless you live outside the UK. Occasionally, we'll make candidates an offer of a place on the basis of their application and qualifications alone.

Staff

Research

Critical race scholarship is one of the most active areas of research at Goldsmiths, and as a postgraduate student you will be immersed in the wide range of talks, research seminars and conferences that take place within the academic community here. Events such as the recent Are You Being Heard? event on diversity in the media inform national policy debates on the future of the media.

Careers

Skills

This degree will equip you with the ability to recognise and negotiate sensitive ethical issues in research and representation. You will also hone your ability to listen and speak to diverse audiences.

As a graduate from this degree you will develop excellent critical thinking and teamwork skills. The practical and research elements of the course will also equip you with the skills to design and implement projects. These transferable skills are highly valued by employers across many sectors.

Careers

The knowledge and skills you will graduate with from this degree will mean you are well-equipped to enter a diverse range of roles, particularly in relation to issues of equality, diversity and social justice. This could include governmental and public administration roles, NGO and charity work, policy work, and business and communications. Moreover, the emphasis on media will suit graduates interested in careers in creative and cultural industries.

What our students say

"Not only are the professors leaders in their fields, but the programme tackles contemporary debates surrounding race and ethnicity in a unique way."

"In 2014, I began to volunteer with Grand Bahama Human Rights Association, a local human rights group in The Bahamas, and it was here that I was first exposed to the injustices faced by one of the most marginalized groups in The Bahamas: 'poor blacks' (both Bahamian and non-Bahamian alike).

I began to witness how many migrants and citizens of The Bahamas were often denied access to opportunities because of their race or class passed onto them by their colonial ancestry. This led to my development of an interest in the depiction of Afro-Caribbean minorities in society as well as the media.

While completing my undergraduate degree at the University of The Bahamas (UB), I based my senior research project on the portrayal of Haitians, the largest migrant group in The Bahamas, in local print media before and after the implementation of a controversial immigration policy in November 2014. A mentor at UB recommended that I not only continue this line of research, but also consider applying for a new programme at Goldsmiths which would allow me to further develop my qualitative skills and possibly be a leader in race/media research in The Bahamas.

The MA Race, Media and Social Justice course stood out because not only are the professors the leaders in their fields, but the programme tackles contemporary debates surrounding race and ethnicity from both a media and sociological perspective, which I found unique.

Also, the programme aims to equip students with the necessary skills to understand the representation of race and ethnicity in media with a focus on post-colonial and critical race theories. Coming from a post-colonial Afro-Caribbean country, I was particularly intrigued by this, because it would give me the theoretical tools to understand how the often negative portrayal of 'poor blacks' in Bahamian and Caribbean media can foster stigmatisation.

Having a course like this is extremely important. Too often we forget about the power of the media in shaping the ideas and thoughts of society. This course explores how, in some instances, the media gives power to racism, as well as the idea of race as it relates to social justice in the contemporary moment. Not only does it provide students with a fundamental understanding of post-colonial and race critical theories, but it also encourages them to join and challenge the academic debates surrounding the current representation of minorities in the media internationally.

Once I've finished the course, I hope to pursue doctoral research in media and cultural studies towards a career in academia, or possibly with a civil society in the area of human rights-related media. Not only will obtaining the doctorate allow me to work at the forefront of my field, it will also be a significant personal achievement as I will be the first in my family to achieve a postgraduate degree at this level. Perhaps the most significant reason for engaging in this area of research, aside from my passion for the topic, is the limited body of media and race research and scholarship in and about The Bahamas."

Our MA Culture Industry will allow you to explore the interface between contemporary economics and culture, from the scale of a start-up or artwork to that of governmental policy, a city, or the global marketplace. It will also provide the approaches in critical and theoretical analysis that will enable you to conduct further academic research in areas ranging from art history to urban studies and critical theory.

This MA gives practitioners and theorists the opportunity to research and develop the new boundaries of image-making made possible by technological change within the context of post-industrial culture.

Taught jointly by the Departments of Anthropology and Social, Therapeutic and Community Studies, this MA offers a stimulating synthesis of theory and practice. In short, it is at the heart of what Goldsmiths is all about.